1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to management of electronic records used by systems such as search engines, and more specifically to a method and apparatus for updating content index for content searches on a network.
2. Related Art
There is a recognised need in the market place to search the content provided on various networks and provide the results of searches. For example, a user may access a search engine by a suitable interface (e.g., provided by a web browser) and provide a search criteria (or a query, in general). The search engine performs a search for content matching the search criteria, and sends the results to the user.
The content accessible on the networks is often indexed and stored to enable a faster/efficient search. In general, the indexes are examined to determine the matching content and/or various attributes such as metadata representing the security features (read write permissions), status (last modified/accessed date), access control (who can access the data), etc.
One general requirement is that the indexes be updated to reflect the changes in the content (to be searched). If the indexes are not accurately updated, the search results may correspondingly be erroneous.
In one prior embodiment, a crawler parses databases storing the contents at regular intervals, and updates the indexes to reflect the changes. However, a shorter crawling interval leads to use of undesirable processor time/power. Alternately, a longer interval fails to update the changes for a corresponding long time, thereby providing stale, old or invalid results to a search request (query).
Accordingly, what is needed is a efficient updating of content index for accurate search results without loading the processor time and power.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.